The Wall Street Journal has a weekly feature called Future View, where college students answer a question. This week, the question is whether there's a "campus free-speech crisis."
Here's a response by Sam Wolfe, a comparative literature student at Stanford University:
Ask a liberal student about the “campus free-speech crisis,” and watch him roll his eyes. He’ll tell you it’s a figment of the conservative imagination—a handful of racist speakers have been protested or shut down, but the overwhelming majority proceed without incident. Speak your mind, he’ll insist. No one will punish you for it.And you know who’s especially hurt by this? Liberals. They don’t get exposed to as many different points of view. The more conservative students receive greater opportunities — opportunities to consider more ideas, because they know what they hear/read plus what’s in their heads! After graduation, who’s going to be better-equipped to go out in the world and interact with intellectually diverse groups of people?
Ask a conservative student, however, and you’ll hear her stories: how she couldn’t speak up in her classes, scared to admit that the shibboleths of the left aren’t her own; how she had to self-censor in her dorm and in her academic papers; how she couldn’t imagine revealing her true positions on abortion, affirmative action or gun control.
They’re both right. Rarely do colleges formally punish students for expressing conservative opinions. But when one’s peers and professors are overwhelmingly left-wing, students reasonably fear that they could be ostracized for sharing their beliefs.
Occasional protests against controversial guest speakers are the least important manifestation of the problem. Instead, worry about the intellectually curious student who is afraid to question the prevailing views. If not in college, when?
1 comments:
Except that all assumes that when they get out into the wider world, there's actually an intellectually diverse group of people to deal with. In some places and industries, there definitely is. In others, such as the eduction industry, there really isn't - if the graduate wants to become a teacher (because they like helping kids or some other nefarious reason), they will have to parrot the Leftist shibboleths until they retire (and even then they should be careful about their pension).
Even in industries where there is more political and educational diversity, it's become very, very common for key elements of corporations and other intuitions, elements like HR and the General Counsel's office, to be in the hands of Progressives or other Leftists, which results in an enforced corporate culture that is Lefty, even if many of the people aren't.
The Long March Through the Institutions is definitely a thing, and goes much further than just academia.
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